


Let's Stretch, Bitches

by readbetweenthelions



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Meditation, Team Bonding, Yoga
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-17
Updated: 2012-08-17
Packaged: 2017-11-12 07:51:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readbetweenthelions/pseuds/readbetweenthelions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint Barton wants in on Bruce's custom yoga routine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let's Stretch, Bitches

It is very early on a fine summer morning, and Bruce Banner is contorting himself in the gym Tony had installed in the basement of the Tower to accommodate the Avengers’ training needs. Bruce has done yoga for a long time, even before the accident, and he’s found that now he can’t cope with his stress very well if he doesn’t complete this ritual at least once per day (usually in the mornings, before everyone else is awake so that he has as much silence as he likes.) Bruce has crafted this special brand of stress relief by mixing a principles from yoga and tai chi with a few meditation and stress management mental exercises. It’s rigorous and not always easy, but it’s precisely that which allows it to work so well for him.

Bruce inhales deeply. The room smells faintly of stale sweat – no one has been in here since yesterday afternoon. No one is ever awake this early, so Bruce wakes up this early on purpose, to have a few seconds where Tony isn’t shoving the latest data under his nose, where Steve isn’t asking him to maybe do a little bit of training so he isn’t so out of shape, where Fury isn’t barking commands at him and where Thor isn’t telling his latest long-winded story in his naturally thunderous voice. No SHIELD agents buzzing around with their earpieces and suits, no silent assassin feet as Tasha and Clint roam about searching for something to do, no blaring classic rock from Tony’s workshop. It’s quiet. It’s still. It’s –

Shattered. Bruce has always wished his sense of hearing were better – he didn’t even notice Clint Barton sneak into the training room. But there he is nonetheless, standing feet away from Bruce, eyebrows knitted and mouth curled into a frown as he tries to work out exactly why Bruce is positioned the way he is.

“You look like you’re gonna pull something there, greenskin,” says the assassin. Bruce doesn’t often see Clint dressed this way, in an old t-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts, since he’s usually running around in uniform. It’s odd to see him clad in regular fabrics, as opposed to the leather and Kevlar and synthetic fabrics SHIELD usually has him in. He looks strange, oddly shaped, without a quiver strapped to his back and his bow clutched in one hand.

“I think I’ll be fine,” Bruce says, relaxing himself into a centered position once more, “I’ve been doing this for years. I’m more limber than I seem.”

“Whatever you say, old man,” Clint says airily, perching himself on one of the nearby weightlifting benches. Clint called him that all the time, when Steve wasn’t in the room. When Steve wasn’t around, Bruce was the oldest of all of them, but not by much. Clint, however, was comparatively young, and he would never let it rest. Instead of retorting, Bruce simply closes his eyes, takes a deep breath and slips into another stretch.

“Seriously, what are you doing?” Clint asks only moments later, shattering once again the silence Bruce is now metaphorically staring longingly at as it disappears from his life.

“It’s yoga,” Bruce answers, voice strained with the effort of the stretch. “Well, it’s yoga and tai chi and some meditation. And it doesn’t work if I don’t have quiet.”

“Ah,” says Clint. He tries to be quiet, but can’t help himself. “Why do you do this, Doc? I mean, you look ridiculous.”

Bruce gives up. He untangles himself and sits, cross-legged, on the floor of the gym, hands in his lap. “I do it to relieve stress,” Bruce explains patiently, though he is feeling anything but. “It’s meditation and physical activity. It helps me manage my… condition.”

“Oh,” Clint says, a little awkwardly, realizing he had interrupted something important. “Right then.”

Bruce thinks about resuming his stretches, but he knows he’s bound to be interrupted again. Sure enough, the silence is broken again only moments later – though the words ultimately do surprise Bruce.

“Teach me?” Clint says. Bruce looks at him. Clint’s face is open and honest, for once, and it almost convinces Bruce on that alone.

“Are you serious?” Bruce asks, because with Clint no one can ever be sure of anything. Natasha might be the ultimate master of deception, but Clint has certainly been trained very dependably on this front. He is a spy, after all.

“Of course I’m serious,” says Clint flippantly. “Why would I ask you to teach me if I wasn’t serious? You get some weird ideas, Doc.”

Bruce almost sighs, but decides to keep it to himself. “I don’t know, Clint,” Bruce says flatly. “So many of the things you say are jokes that sometimes I have a hard time telling. Besides, it really isn’t as easy as it looks.”

“Come on, purple pants,” Clint taunts. “I’m always up for a challenge.”

Bruce looks down at his lap. “These are just sweatpants, Clint,” Bruce wails. “It’s a fluke. I didn’t intend for anyone to see me wearing them.”

Clint waves this away. “Come on. I’ve done a few exercises in my time, Doc. I think I can handle it.”

Clint won’t leave this gym without this, and Bruce knows it. He heaves a deep sigh and motions for Clint to come sit on the floor in front of him.

 

***

 

Clint is a quick learner – obviously, he’d need to be, for his line of work. Clint picks up the routine quickly, and it isn’t long before Bruce no longer has to mutter instructions aloud. Clint watches keenly, as he is wont to do, and soon they are breathing and moving and stretching in sync, each of them shut away in their own heads.

It took a little while for Clint to understand the need for silence. To him, at first, he understood only the physical part of it - stretching often-neglected muscles, focusing on important areas of one’s body. It was little more than a pre-workout stretch to him for a while, but gradually he came to understand the most important part of it. It was meditation. It was shutting all of the things in your life out, and focusing on the you inside your head. For Bruce, it was looking the Hulk in the eye and saying, “Not today.” It was saying, “Someday, but not today.” It was being in touch with that other part of himself, the part that lashed out like a spoiled child when neglected for too long. For Bruce, it was taking some of the Hulk’s anger away and taking it into himself, where he could soothe it and neutralize it and take a little of the pain away from the wounded and cornered animal that lurked in his psyche. Bruce hadn’t the slightest idea what it was that Clint thought of, what Clint needed in his own mind - but that wasn’t the point. It was personal. It was different for everyone.

Honestly, Bruce hadn’t expected Clint to stick with it long. Bruce had never really had a pupil in this, or even a teacher - he’d had many teachers in many different disciplines, but no one thing ever worked well enough for him, so he’d adapted this style for his own purposes. It was molded to him entirely, it was as familiar to him as a child, as something he’d built for himself with his own two hands. At first Bruce hadn’t known what to say - how to explain these motions that had just become muscle memory, the mental routines that he’d twisted to his purposes. But Clint, far from bored with Bruce’s soft, slow explanations, had stuck with it – he’d woken up early to join Bruce in the gym each day. It grows to a routine, to have someone so close physically but so far away mentally.

The real shock comes when Clint and Bruce are in the middle of their routine, weeks later, and Pepper Potts walks through the door of the gym. She’s holding a clipboard – when isn’t she holding a clipboard? – and her heels click lightly on the wood floor of the gym.

“Bruce, I need – ” Pepper begins, then glances up from her clipboard. “What are you two doing?” she asks, bemused.

“Yoga,” Clint explains. “Well, sort of yoga.”

“Huh,” Pepper says. “I wouldn’t have picked you for a yoga man, Clint.”

“It’s all Bruce,” Clint shrugs. “He roped me into this.”

“You asked me to teach you,” Bruce retorts, glancing sideways at Clint. Clint lifts a hand from where it rests on his own leg and waves a hand in the air, as if he were physically brushing Bruce’s comment away.

“Are you two in here every morning?” Pepper asks. They nod. “Well,” Pepper continues. “I need your signature on this, Bruce.” Bruce reaches up and signs the papers on the clipboard with the proffered pen, then Pepper disappears as quickly as she had come.

The next morning, however, Pepper shows up in a t-shirt and a pair of yoga pants, her flaming red hair in a tight ponytail, and sits cross-legged in front of an astonished Bruce and Clint.

“You taught him,” Pepper says to Bruce, with a nod towards Clint. “Which means you ought to be able to teach me.”

To her credit, Pepper understands the mental part of it almost instantly, and takes to the meditation like a fish to water, though the physical exercises don’t quite catch up for weeks. Bruce supposes she must need it almost as much as he does – it can’t be easy for her, managing the prodigious Stark Industries, not to mention playing nanny to Tony Stark and the rest of the Avengers every day.

Bruce almost isn’t surprised when Natasha shows up without a word one day, and picks it up quicker than any of them, almost without instruction. Soon, the four of them are sitting in silence on the floor of the gym every morning, breathing synchronized and

It’s not long until Tony finds out, and he teases them mercilessly. Pepper and Bruce shrug it off – they’re used to this, coming from Tony especially. Natasha merely gives him cold looks and reminds him that she can still beat Tony in any form of combat he chooses. Clint, however, chafes under the torment, and shoots back insults whenever possible. The bickering becomes so unbearable that Pepper enlists a few SHIELD agents to keep the two apart until the novelty of it wears off for Tony.

The yoga binds the four of them together, these four human beings who don’t have superpowers, who don’t have supersoldier serum or Asgardian strength or an iron suit. There’s just Pepper (so capable in everything she does but so fragile next to the rest of them), Natasha and Clint (highly trained assassins but under it all, just people) and Bruce (who is only a man, after all – the Hulk is the one with everything special.) There are days when Natasha or Clint or both are off on some mission, and Pepper and Bruce meditate together, enjoying each other but missing their other partners. Pepper does the routine alone when Bruce and Natasha and Clint are off saving the world – she goes through it the way Bruce taught her and she shuts out the panic that threatens to overtake her when she realizes she might never see them again. And every now and then Bruce does an extra session in his room before he sleeps, when he can feel the nightmares pressing closer.

It’s become a part of them now, and Bruce looks back and realizes what a lonely thing it was before the others joined him.

**Author's Note:**

> Written at the request of my lovely friend Heather. This was supposed to be a little silly but oops i accidentally feels. Title of course inspired by the always amazing Jeremy Renner.


End file.
